Don’t jail the elderly

Evidence shows people ‘‘age out’’ of crime. So why still lock them up?

Geraldine Downey Frances Negrón-Muntaner GERALDINE DOWNEY is the director of the Center for Justice, and FRANCES NEGRÓNMUNTANER is a professor at the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, both at Columbia University.OPINION

In 1980, the methadone clinic that had been treating Gloria Rubero as an outpatient dropped her. She was soon desperate for drugs. In August that year, she and an associate took part in a burglary that went wrong and led to the murder of an elderly...